1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to object recognition and identification in a computerized processing system, and more particularly in one exemplary aspect to a computer vision apparatus and methods of pulse-code invariant object recognition.
2. Description of Related Art
Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. It is often desired to recognize objects invariantly with respect to object parameters, such as position, size, or orientation. Typically, an object of interest is identified in a visual field, and a variety of transformations is performed (e.g., scale, translation, etc.) in order to transform a “raw” object to a preferred, optimal, or canonical form for subsequent analysis. Such approach generally requires a mechanism of rough estimation of the location of the raw object of interest in a visual field that often contains additional ‘unwanted’ objects, such as for example noise, background, and other distracters that complicate or impede object recognition efforts.
Other object recognition techniques rely on a matched filter approach. Under this approach, objects are detected by a bank of filters, with each filter tuned to a particular object type, size, and/or location. Therefore, the filter produces an output signal when it detects a ‘match’ in an incoming signal. Matched filter techniques require a multitude of filters, as they must be placed at multiple locations where the object can be present; each location requires filters tuned to different size of the object, and possibly different rotation. This is performed for every object of interest, so the matched filter technique scales poorly as the number of objects of interest increases, as redundant filters for all possible parameters of the object (e.g., size, orientation, and location) are required.
Accordingly, there is a salient need for a computerized object recognition solution that offers a lower cost and complexity, yet which is capable of dealing with many objects having different parameters.